Namaste!

I'm in a place I've dreamed of visiting as long as I can remember.

It started out with a surge of adrenaline as our plane took a nose dive in to the thick brown Kathmandu air, and Josh said he was sure that the plane was going to flip over and burst in to flames as we fish tailed down the runway.  We had a ride waiting for us, the brother of the Couchsurfing family we were planning on staying with (check out couchsurfing.com by the way), and we managed to cram ourselves in to the teeny tiny Suzuki taxis that are omnipresent here.

Traffic in Kathmandu is one of those things you hear about but you don't believe until you see it.  There seem to be almost no rules of the road, you're competing for space with taxis, private cars, motorbikes, rickshaws, bicycles, animals, old women selling vegetables, men offering hashish, kids high on glue they've huffed, and brave pedestrians on foot.  The honking is comparable to Beirut, but the horns here seem to be much louder.  Somehow people manage to avoid crashing, although we hear it's common.

It's fascinating to see the mixture of Buddhist and Hindu influence in both the architecture and dress of the people.   There are little passageways that lead to beautiful open sunny courtyards on every street, it's just a matter of getting lost and poking your head in to these little oases!